{"product_id":"the-telephone-book-technology-schizophrenia-electric-speech","title":"The Telephone Book: Technology  Schizophrenia  Electric Speech","description":"\u003cp\u003eThe telephone marks the place of an absence. Affiliated with discontinuity  alarm  and silence  it raises fundamental questions about the constitution of self and other  the stability of location  systems of transfer  and the destination of speech. Profoundly changing our concept of long-distance  it is constantly transmitting effects of real and evocative power. To the extent that it always relates us to the absent other  the telephone  and the massive switchboard attending it  plugs into a hermeneutics of mourning. The Telephone Book  itself organized by a \"telephonic logic \" fields calls from philosophy  history  literature  and psychoanalysis. It installs a switchboard that hooks up diverse types of knowledge while rerouting and jamming the codes of the disciplines in daring ways. Avital Ronell has done nothing less than consider the impact of the telephone on modern thought. Her highly original  multifaceted inquiry into the nature of communication in a technological age will excite everyone who listens in. The book begins by calling close attention to the importance of the telephone in Nazi organization and propaganda  with special regard to the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. In the Third Reich the telephone became a weapon  a means of state surveillance  \"an open accomplice to lies.\" Heidegger  in Being and Time and elsewhere  elaborates on the significance of \"the call.\" In a tour de force response  Ronell mobilizes the history and terminology of the telephone to explicate his difficult philosophy. Ronell also speaks of the appearance of the telephone in the literary works of Duras  Joyce  Kafka  Rilke  and Strindberg. She examines its role in psychoanalysisFreud said that the unconscious is structured like a telephone  and Jung and R. D. Laing saw it as a powerful new body part. She traces its historical development from Bells famous first call: \"Watson  come here!\" Thomas A. Watson  his assistant  who used to communicate with spirits  was eager to get the telephone to talk  and thus to link technology with phantoms and phantasms. In many ways a meditation on the technologically constituted state  The Telephone Book opens a new field  becoming the first political deconstruction of technology  state terrorism  and schizophrenia. And it offers a fresh reading of the American and European addiction to technology in which the telephone emerges as the crucial figure of this age.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"My Store","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44945905778741,"sku":"ByrdShop_0803289383","price":40.93,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0627\/8139\/0901\/files\/9780803289383_c32a0356-6add-4f6d-a83e-36f0ba76f7b4.jpg?v=1772142889","url":"https:\/\/atxbooks.com\/products\/the-telephone-book-technology-schizophrenia-electric-speech","provider":"ATX Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}